Tag: grammar

Doug LeMoine is puz­zled that the con­struc­tion of Face­book sta­tus updates requires me/him to refer to myself/himself in the third per­son. This for­mat gives struc­ture to the News Feed, but it also encour­ages the updater to craft the update as a sen­tence begin­ning with his/her full name. The forced third-per­son would seem to cre­ate myr­i­ad gram­mat­i­cal prob­lems as peo­ple try to con­struct mean­ing­ful sen­tences, but pret­ty much every­one ignores gram­mat­i­cal cor­rect­ness (not sur­pris­ing). The sur­pris­ing thing is, gram­mat­i­cal­ly incor­rect sta­tus updates don't real­ly seem weird (to me) any­more.(It's pos­si­ble that I'm tak­ing this all far too seri­ous­ly).When I first joined Face­book, I duti­ful­ly wrote all of my sta­tus updates in the third per­son, as the for­mat dic­tates. Because I am both a gram­mar snob and a rule-follower.

Rule-abiding: Doug … his

This con­struc­tion is appro­pri­ate for the feed, but it's also ter­ri­bly awk­ward. Sta­tus­es are usu­al­ly per­son­al, "microblog-ish" bits of con­tent, and it just sounds weird when per­son­al stuff is writ­ten in the third per­son. Recent­ly, I start­ed to lapse into the first per­son in the body of the sta­tus, and while doing so, I cringed in antic­i­pa­tion of the inevitable condemnation. 

Rule-bending? Rule-breaking? Rule-adapting: Doug … my

But so far, there has been no con­dem­na­tion forth­com­ing. Why? Maybe we all quick­ly become blind to the total­ly obvi­ous dis­agree­ment? Or maybe it just makes cog­ni­tive sense that the con­tent of the sta­tus will be in the first per­son? If the lat­ter is true, how soon will we be updat­ing Fowler and Strunk & White to reflect this new kind of usage?